'Gender Panic' Affects Attitudes About Transgender Rights

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This week, the U.S. Senate will vote on the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would protect the rights of
gay and transgender people in the workplace.

ENDA aims to prevent against discrimination based on sexual
orientation or gender identity. The Senate seems likely to pass
the bill with bipartisan support, but the legislation does not
have support from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, according
to statements by his spokesman, which could stall the bill's
progress in the House of Representatives.

Why has there been so much difficulty in passing
nondiscrimination laws, especially given the surge in support for
gay marriage in the United States in recent years? A new analysis
of
reactions to transgender issues suggests one reason: People
who don't fit neatly into the category of "male" or "female"
cause deep-seated unease. [ 5
Myths About Gay People, Debunked ]

"For many people, it's a challenge to ideas about gender," said
study researcher Kristen Schilt, a sociologist at the University
of Chicago. Many of these ideas are deeply held, and even
religiously engrained in people, Schilt told LiveScience.

The issue of transgender rights has emerged in the wake of
increasing public acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but
policies about transgender people often hit problems related to
defining gender, Schilt and her colleague Laurel Westbrook, a
sociologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan,
reported online Sept. 24 in the journal Gender & Society.

Schilt and Westbrook analyzed news stories about three
transgender-policy cases: the attempted passage of
transgender-rights bills in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and at
the federal level; an attempt to change New York City
birth-certificate requirements so that transgender people could
alter their legal gender without undergoing genital surgery; and
policies surrounding who can participate in gender-segregated
sports.

The researchers examined arguments for and against these
policies, noting beliefs about what makes a person a man or a
woman, rationales for excluding transgender people from sports
and other activities and the types of spaces (for instance, the
office or locker room) people cited, whether gender-segregated or
not.

Biology versus identity

The researchers found that, overall, people identify gender by
two broad criteria: how the person self-identifies, and that
person's biology. Biology can mean that people identify a
person's gender by whatever his or her sex
chromosomes say — XX for women, or XY for men. But more
often, biological gender is identified by genitals.

In nongendered spaces, such as the workplace, people are fairly
willing to take a transgender person at their word, Schilt and
Westbrook found. If someone identifies as male, for instance,
that's enough. But when spaces are gender-segregated (such as
bathrooms or locker rooms), definitions get dicey. That's when
people tend to revert to genitals as the true marker of one's
sex.

For example, in 2006, a bill introduced in New York City proposed
that people be allowed to change their gender on their birth
certificates if they'd been living as that gender for at least
two years and had documentation from medical professionals that
they intended the change to be permanent. There was no
requirement for
genital surgery, sometimes called gender reassignment
surgery. [ How
Gender Reassignment Works (Infographic) ]

The lack of surgical requirement eventually scuttled the proposal
by setting off what Schilt and Westbrook call a "gender panic."
People might be able to cope with a man becoming a woman, but a
woman with a penis doesn't fit into the typical conception of
male or female. Those attitudes are problematic for transgender
people, Schilt said.

"Many people don't want to — or can't afford to — have genital
surgery," she said. "[Surgery requirements] eradicate a lot of
the potential benefits of these bills. And it also puts demands
on people about what they have to do with their bodies."

Women as weak

Notably, gender panics arise over biological men gaining access
to female spaces — not the other way around. Not as many people
are bothered by a trans man (a biological woman who has
transitioned to living as a man) in the guy's locker room, Schilt
said, so the argument against nondiscrimination policies focuses
instead on trans women (biological men who have transitioned to
living as women) in women's bathrooms, locker rooms and other
gender-segregated places.

Opponents argue that trans women (who are born biologically male)
are a danger to other women, Schilt said. Alternatively, they
argue that men will pretend to be transgender in order to prey on
women and children in bathrooms and other "safe" spaces.

"It's very difficult to counter this kind of fear argument,"
Schilt said. Women are thought of as being vulnerable to
predators and are often taught from an early age to
protect themselves from potential rapists, she said.

Similar ideas of women as weak show up in sports policies, which
more strictly regulate trans women's
participation in women's sports than trans men's
participation in men's sports, the researchers found.

The take-away message, Schilt said, is that advocates for
transgender rights should watch out for requirements about
surgery, lest only trans people with the money and desire to
reshape their genitals end up protected.